Diana Curin
'Diana Hartwell Curin '(1898-1985) was a Sednyanese general and politician who served as the seventy-first president of Sednyana from 1951 to 1957. Curin's term as president overlapped with the Sednyanese involvement in the Ukari War, of which Curin was a major advocate. She is also notable for having been the first female president of Sendyana. Curin served in command in the Sednyanese military for twenty years; after being the third woman to graduate from the Sednyanese Military Academy in 1921, she rose to the position of general in the Sednyanese military by 1935, and, in 1942, was appointed the Army Chief of Staff under president Arafua. In 1949, president Kenneth Barlow named her secretary of state, a position which she served for only three years before launching her presidential campaign in 1952 on the Social Democratic Party ticket, centering her campaign around Sednyanese involvement in the Ukari War, which had already broken out. She was the first major female nominee from the Social Democratic Party, and the second major female nominee from any party; her victory in 1952 made her Sednyana's first female president. The Ukari War dominated Curin's time as president. Although at first her influential rhetoric of democracy made her wildly popular, as the war turned sour her approval ratings dropped sharply. She barely carried reelection in 1955, accusing supporters of her opponent, the non-interventionist Henry Bryan, of being traitors to Sednyana during a time of crisis. However, her second term proved to be far worse than her first, as the economic drain of the war damaged the Sednyanese economy and the disastrous Battle of Manahara resulted in over 12,000 Sednyanese casualties. In her haste to end the war after Manahara, she signed the Treaty of Hadieva, which alienated her original ardently pro-war supporters by compromising with the Kingdom of Ukar and allowing them to continue to exist in the south. Curin chose not to run for reelection in 1958 due to her approval ratings being below 15%, and spent much of the rest of her life speaking to veterans and soldiers about the experience of war. She published three novels post-presidency, and over time historians have come to view her in a more positive, if mixed, light than popular opinion had at the end of her presidency. She died in 1985 in Telphis, at the age of eighty-seven. She continues to have a highly mixed legacy, viewed by some as a tragic Sednyanese hero or a champion of militant feminism and by others as a hubristic, war-hungry fool. Early Life Write the first section of your page here. Military Career Presidency Write the second section of your page here. Post-Presidency and Death Write the second section of your page here. Legacy As a historic president, Curin's legacy has been complicated and deeply ingrained in Sednyanese culture and politics. She managed to alienate the conservative right through her embrace of feminism; the liberalists through her support for big government social programs; and much of the Left through her escalation of the War in Ukar and rhetoric of Sednyanese exceptionalism. She left office with some of the lowest approval ratings of any president ever, and did not run for reelection in 1958. Decisions made by her personally led to over 12,000 Sednyanese casualties and the first major military loss for Sednyana in nearly two hundred years. Despite this, Curin has left longlasting effects on both the politics on the Southern Continent and the political imagination of Sednyana. As the first female president in the nation's history and one of the earliest female leaders of a major country in the world, Curin inspired generations of female politicians. She initiated a far broader acceptance of feminism in the popular imagination, and is often associated with a shifting gender politics in Sednyana during the 1950s - the presence of a strong and aggressive female as the head of state during a time of war brought many more women into the public sphere and turned the idea of a cult of domesticity into a conservative fringe. Her charismatic and powerful public image made her the best known Sednyanese president around the world in history, and during her lifetime she was the most discussed head of state in the world, drawing more and more attention to Sednyana as the world's preeminent global power next to Lasterus. Curin also left a profound effect on the politics of the Southern Continent. She - and her secretary of state Madeline Potter, is often seen as the master architect of the new order of the Southern Continent that existed throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, with Sednyana as the central pole. She created the Southern Continental Community (SCC), a precursor to the International Alliance, and served as a powerful advocate of the alliance during its creation in 1973. A 2001 poll of historians named Curin the second most influential Sednyanese president of the twentieth century, after Stuart Pontichar, and the tenth in history. Another poll, in 2002, named her the most influential Sednyanese woman of the twentieth century, and world's second most influential woman. Polls of greatest presidents vary hugely in ranking Curin, placing her anywhere from ninth to sixth-to-last. Category:History (Sednyana) Category:Sednyana Category:Sednyanese presidents Category:Ukari War